Monthly Archives: April 2013

I am going to start to develop the Pentaho Reporting video course for Packt Publishing Limited, a modern publishing company, producing cutting-edge books, eBooks, and articles for communities of developers, administrators, and newbies alike.

Are you bored on installing each time a new environment fron scratch loosing hours and hours and hours and hours…

Start in minutes and do not repeat yourself!

Ansible is a radically simple IT orchestration solution that automates configuration, software deployment, and other IT needs. Ansible models your IT infrastructure by looking at the comprehensive architecture of how all of your systems inter-relate, rather than just managing one system at a time. It uses no agents and no additional custom security infrastructure, so it’s exceedingly easy to deploy — and most importantly, it uses a very simple language (called playbooks) that allows describing your automation in plain English, rather than writing things that have the complexity of software code. By using Ansible, you’ll be faster at automating your IT, but also be able to achieve new capabilities you haven’t been able to before.

In this post is described how to prepare a concrete architecture where you can develop, more or less, everything as starting point of every work. The architecture is composed by two virtual machines: an Ansible server and a target server. Of course you can use phisical servers, in house or cloud, simply accessing them using ssh.

The role of the Ansible server is to manage the scripts (called playbooks) for the configuration, software deployment, and other IT needs on the target server. Very important is to underline that every activity with Ansible is idempotent. This means that executing the activities multiple times, the result is always the same.

Preparing the target server

Create a new virtual machine with the connection to the LAN “bridged” to let the server be reachable.

Start the brand new virtual machine installing XUbuntu 12.10. During the installation create the user ‘ansible’ we will use as manager of the installation. After all, reboot the system as requested to complete the installation.

Login as ansible user and open a terminal executing:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

It’s suggested to reboot the system more times and execute the upgrade again. Finally install the ssh server to let the Ansible server connect.